Really, they are pencil and notebook wraps. But I made them specifically for our trips to the zoo. We got a family membership to the Woodland Park Zoo this year (thank you MP3!), and took our first trip on Tuesday. I was working frantically THAT MORNING to make these...
And inside...
Admittedly, not my best workmanship (notice the crooked sewing lines), but I just HAD to get them done before we left!! (My life is all about the details, after all... not the straight line, perfection details, but the "little touches", like having a special zoo wrap to use whenever we visit the zoo.)
Here's the tutorial (because you know you want to make one, too.) I just adjusted the size to fit the notebooks I bought. I found these at Paper Zone - they are spiral bound, with blank drawing paper, perforated at the edge for a clean tear... perfect for this project. (And just so we'll remember in 20 years when we read our family yearbook that I get printed from the blog... the Zebra one is Hallie's, the Monkey is Sam's.)
We wanted our zoo experiences to be intentionally educational, without detracting from the experience (like I saw with all the school groups - kids running around trying to fill out a worksheet full of questions before they had to leave. How much of that information do you think they actually retained, and how much did they observe about the behavior of the animals as they went running past?) So the kids have their zoo wraps. Periodically we stop to write down observations or draw an animal they liked. (It has to go through the brain to translate from the eyes (seeing), to the hands (drawing & writing), which helps internalize what they are learning.)
We're going to use their drawings and observations to make their own mini-books of our zoo year. Stay tuned.
